Flash: Lip Sync

My second workshop was lip sync in Flash. I had made two stop motion shorts with lip sync in prior to the course but still struggled with the workshop. Here is my lip sync from the workshop itself;

I've paired up with Laura Tofarides to create our own lip sync in Flash, using characters we designed previously in the Design for Animation module. Her character is a tobacco leaf named Leaf Boy:

And my character is Mr. Whiskers, a well-to-do British fat cat. He is 'new money' and is unaware of the fact he is not as upper class as he thinks. He finds himself hilarious and has no concept of when he's taken things too far. He started out as a drawn character but develped into photo cutout. For the Flash film he will be hand drawn, without his hat and collar, and with fewer stripes, to make him more economical to animate;

So, the storyline we came up with to tie these characters together was a theological conversation on the kitchen windowledge. We made Leaf Boy into a leaf on a house plant and found a Radio 4 clip of a discussion about free will. We wanted two droll, serious old men to be the voices and found them in the podcast. Our idea is that they are having an intense existential conversation, then suddenly Mr. Whiskers reverts to being a cat, and takes a bite out of the leaf. This is our script:Leaf Boy: "You'd basically just have to scan the whole universe, wait 'til the end and say 'Right, the universe is over, all the events were determined, so that's as though it was true.'"

Mr. Whiskers: "In that case we seem to have lost, as it were, my capacity to intervene and make things happen."Here is the concept art and rough storyboards for our film:

Below is the final storyboard;

Before diving in to animating, we both filmed ourselves reading the script so we could analyse the lip movements;

I then worked out my character's (Mr. Whiskers) mouth shapes. I used The Aristocats as inspiration for how to make cats look like they're talking; one major thing I noticed was that the tongues and teeth are always in view to prevent them flashing, and the inside of the mouth is coloured instead of black, making the mouth more readable. Therefore I will bear this in mind whilst animating.

As another inspiration, to help me animate Mr. Whiskers' moustache, I have been studying the movements of Dr. Dawson's moustache in Disney's 'The Great Mouse Detective'. His moustache portrays his words and emotions even better than his mouth.

Both Laura and I broke down the script into the mouth shapes we thought we needed, as a guide to animating;

Finally, here is the finished film. It is called 'Beleafs in Meowtaphysics', a terrible double-pun I came up with.